How Apollo Answering Service Doubled Their Revenue In 18 Months (with Matt Ackerson)

Matt Ackerson is the Founder and CEO of Petovera (meaning to seek truth), a company that is essentially a vending machine for web marketing and lead generation services on the internet. Petovera specializes in the most crucial areas of digital marketing such as building sales funnels, landing pages, lead magnets, and email autoresponders.

Tim: For a lot of traditional service based businesses, the marketing method of choice has been pounding pavement. Securing new clients can mean a truckload of manual effort. Being able to automate your customer acquisition can make the difference between making it and crushing it. So when the folks at Apollo Answering Service Approached Matt Ackerson from Petalvera about how to make this happen, he put in place a really simple strategy that allowed them to double their revenue in just 18 months and have a process that would simplify their customer acquisition efforts forever. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey Matt, welcome to ConversionCast. Thanks for coming on the show

Matt: Thank you very much Tim. It’s a pleasure and an honor.

Tim: Oh yeah, I’m really stoked to have you here and so before we get into the tactic itself as we always do I would love it if you would kind of share with us what were the results you were able to get with what we’re going to talk about today.

Matt: Absolutely. So the results that were able to get for our client Kelly at Apollo Answering service in Houston Texas was we were able to not just double her leads but more than double her revenue in a span of 18 months. Most of that growth occurring in the ending eight months of that period.

Tim: Wow that’s awesome. We always love it.. see you know, I love hearing about you know, increased leads and email open rates and all of those things but at the end of the day when you’re doubling revenue, that’s pretty powerful. So I love that. Before we dive into the tactic itself though tell us a little bit about kind of who you are and what you do.

Matt: Sure so my name is Matt Ackerson. I’m the founder and CEO of the company called Petovera.com. And the name comes from Latin. Everyone tells me it sounds kind of weird but in Latin it means to seek truth. You can think of this kind of like a vending machine for web marketing and lead generation services on the internet.

Tim: Nice. I like that. Very cool. Alright. So this was something that – this is something you had done for a client. Maybe tell us a little bit about your client Kelly and what they were doing before you implemented these tactics.

Matt: Absolutely. So Kelly who is the co-owner and manager of the business she was actually the granddaughter of the founder of Apollo Answering Services. So this is a 40-year old family owned business in Houston Texas and it’s an answering service. So their clients were typically lawyers, doctors, construction companies who would need people to answer the phone for them while they’re out for the holiday or it’s a patient emergency or client emergency or something like that. They would call and they would get access to [indiscernible [0:02:47]] via Apollo who take messages and that messages and whatever the need be.

When Kelly came to us, about just over a year and a half ago, you know, the business was really struggling. It was really struggling – the way that Kelly described it to me was that they had literally no degeneration system in place. They had a website as you know, most business owners and entrepreneurs do today. It’s fairly easy to set up a website. But it really wasn’t producing any results for them. It was just a brochure website and in order to jump up business Kelly would have to drive back and forth across town, make these manual custom proposals every time. Go door to door hustle and honestly the business was struggling and they had a lot of trouble retaining talent as a result of that. And because they had no process in place, Kelly had to do all this manually and it was a huge time sink.

Tim: So they were using pretty much entirely old school you know, pounding pavement methods to generate all their leads. So what did you end up doing to help them kind of get out of that and you know, what doubled their revenue?

Matt: The way that we accomplished that goal was we helped them to productive their business which is kind of a fancy way or a casual way these days of saying you know, helping them to systemize their lead generation process and systematize their follow up.

So what we did was we went through two redesign iterations of their website so that we turned her brochure website into a sales funnel with an email automated sequence as part of that.

So we did the basics and then we also went a step further and I’ll describe what I mean by that. So the basics as I see it are that we rewrote and this is how we started – we rewrote the entire website to have clear copy, clear compelling copy with a clear and compelling message. You can actually see this for yourself if you want to follow on. You can go to AnsweringServiceHouston.com. Houston as in Houston Texas. We made the copy so that it was written in a tone that was casual. It felt like someone was talking to you but that it was also very clear and benefits the focus.

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So for example their headline right on their homepage it starts with a problem while also highlighting what makes Apollo answering services unique. For example nobody really wants to talk to a machine. You know, that highlights the fact that people want their phones answered but at the same time they want that personal human element to it. So that was kind of the first big thing that we did. The second kind of best practice being created was clear call to action buttons. We included multiple, multiple clear call to action buttons across the site and we organized them Tim in a way that was kind of – we kind of thought about it as we wanted to create a logical flow. A kind of a logical journey where we’re pushing prospects who arrives on a home page of the website down to the next logical step. So first you want to learn perhaps you know, what is an overview of what Apollo Answering Service can actually do for you and your business. Second what’s perhaps some of the specific benefits that they can provide. And third, let’s either take them into the pricing page or as an alternative we can take them to the data’s page if they want to learn more about the history of the company.

Tim: Nice. So it sounds like so far kind of the main things were just being really clear in everything you do, in your messaging, in kind of the steps through your funnel and that kind of thing.

Matt: That’s right and kind of the amazing thing if you actually go and look the website is there’s not a huge amount of text on each of the pages. It’s fairly – it’s not meant to overwhelm the reader at all. It’s straightforward and it’s just very clear and we have visuals to kind of complement the copy as well. I would say that would be another best practice in addition to the social proof that we really emphasized towards the footer of each page where why showed where there were featured. We used credible third party logos like the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, and then we also had testimonials one at a time. I think that’s important one at a time in the footer as well along with photo of the client who was actually providing the testimonial.

Tim: Awesome. Was there anything else that you did that really kind of helped drive this home?

Matt: Yes. So getting towards the product elements of it when people would actually go towards the bottom of the funnel on the website when they wanted pricing information, the first thing is we would actually capture their information before they got access to see all the pricing packages right in the spot. This allowed Kelly an opportunity to follow up with that prospect and see if they had any additional questions about purchasing if they didn’t immediately proceed the purchase after that step. So they filled out that form and they would get access to the packages that Apollo Answering Service offered. This was kind of a very – this was a great process innovation I would say for the company as a service business because a lot of service businesses don’t actually put pricing on their website.

But after doing this this was a big factor I would say in actually using that not just the lead generation result but also the revenue results since pricing information was (a) information that people wanted and (b) they were willing to actually in many cases check out directly on the website. Now in most cases, people weren’t willing to do that at least not right away. So they would go into a follow up sequence three email follow up sequence or the following I believe it was one week about 20 email every other day and in the final email I would say this final email was really an important factor as well in getting people to actually make a purchase decision Tim.

The thing about this last email that was particularly interesting was that it was direct, it was professional but it was direct. In the way that d subject line was one word. It said decision? And the email itself was about three sentences where it was just nudging people to actually make a purchase decision saying okay you have all the information you need what are you going to do now? That was kind of the essential message of it.

That had a very high click through rate which drove additional conversions in sales.

Tim: So it helped you not only get folks who –you know, it helped you not only be able to directly communicate with the folks that you knew were potentially interested in buying but it also made it so that you were able to capture the information of the people that wanted to check it out, wanted to see the pricing but weren’t able to or weren’t really willing to make a decision right at that very moment.

Matt: Absolutely.

Tim: Nice.

Matt: Absolutely. As is the case with many service businesses, people would have additional questions before making a purchase.

Tim: Right. SO this kind of allowed you to get their information outside of just the traditional lead magnet. In this case, it’s kind of like the price itself but the pricing itself was the lead magnet. I like that. That’s really unique. Awesome, Matt. Well thank you so much for sharing this with us. I know that people are going to be stoked to implement a few of the things that they heard, so thanks so much for coming on ConversionCast.